Learn Igbo: Numbers, Greetings & Conversation

Dialects, standard Igbo and dictionaries

Owerri and Onitsha, the standard called Igbo Izugbe, three spellings of one name and 150 years of dictionaries.

Lesson 1 of 4

Two big zones

A family of dialects

Igbo is a family of closely related dialects. One dictionary groups them into two major zones, Owerri and Onitsha. People from different zones understand each other less easily, but the basic elements of the language stay the same.

Same idea, different words

Meaning	Owerri	Onitsha
eat something	rie ihe	lie ire
think	cee	loo

The forms cannot be swapped between zones. Food is nri or nni.

Lesson 2 of 4

Igbo Izugbe

A shared written standard

Standard written Igbo, Igbo Izugbe, was drawn up by the SPILC committee from a generalised Owerri–Umuahia Igbo and a generalised Onitsha Igbo.

A dictionary author thinks this is sensible for sentence structure but may impoverish vocabulary by erasing dialect words, so he argues creative writers should stay faithful to their own dialect.

Lesson 3 of 4

Igbo, Ibo and igbo

Three spellings

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Did you know?

The lower-case noun igbo means “upland; poor farmland far from the waterside”, and some riverine communities used it as a mildly disparaging name for other Igbo. “Ibo” appears in colonial sources.

Lesson 4 of 4

A short history of dictionaries

From 1852 to 2001

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1. 1852
Schön publishes an early Igbo vocabulary.
2. 1904–1923
Ganot (1904), N. W. Thomas (1913) and Archdeacon Dennis and colleagues (1923) follow.
3. 1962
F. C. Ogbalu’s Okowa Okwu, an important dictionary by an Igbo author.
4. 1967–1985
Armstrong (1967), Welmers (1968), Williamson (1972) and Nnaji (1985).
5. 2001
Michael Echeruo’s Igbo-English Dictionary (preface 1997) is printed by Longman Nigeria.

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